At long last, I have some news. After six years, I’m leaving Bauer and moving got to pastures new – or at least to allow myself some time to do some more creative work.
I haven’t really talked much about work here as I prefer to compartmentalise it, and because the actual amount that I can talk about is usually quite limited. But I have been director of content and audience development there, and although I’ve loved the work and the people, the amount of opportunity that I have had to be creative has been limited. I have mostly been managing people, and although I’m good at that and find it rewarding, it has left an itch which I have needed to scratch.
I have written before about how I’ve been scratching that itch with creative writing, but combining that with a day job which really does take a lot of energy has been difficult. So when a chance came to move on and do something new as my responsibilities at work were changing, it felt like the right time to take it.
The plan is to take a couple of months and push my writing harder. I don’t know how far I can get with this – and I definitely don’t know if there’s any kind of “career” there – but having the space and time to try seems like an opportunity which doesn’t come along often. I don’t think I’m quite in the same position as Lee Child, who famously got made redundant and gave himself six months to write a bestseller, but I would like to explore if this is something I want to do more of. And if you have the chance, it would be crazy to let that chance slip past you.
My last day at work was Friday, so now I am officially unemployed. Or perhaps I’m actually a writer. Who knows yet? Perhaps Monday is the first day as something different.
Leaving a job is a strange experience, and one I have only had three times. Leaving MacUser was mostly about feeling burned out and wanting an easier life. I was living in Brighton and the commute up to London – which I was doing every day – was taxing. I knew I could make a decent living freelancing, and I did. Leaving Redwood was easy, as after eight years in the world of contract publishing, the chance to move back to Dennis felt like a good one. And leaving Dennis was also an obvious move, as I was going to a bigger company and a bigger role, working with some of the best brands in the world across publishing and radio.
This feels a bit more like that first time because I genuinely don’t know exactly what the future holds yet. But I know that, really, it has to be now. I’m 56, which means another fifteen years or so before I can retire. If I stayed much longer at Bauer, it would be the last place I ever worked. And I don’t feel like I want to work anywhere for what would have ended up as 23 years if I had stayed. While my dad was content to work for British Rail for 44 years (literally man and boy, as he started there when he was 14) that’s just not for me.
So here I am. Let’s see where things take me.
Things I have been writing
Not much – as you can imagine, my last week at work was filled with paperwork and no spare time. It wasn’t stressful, but there is a lot to do when you leave a job, not the least leaving things in a relatively orderly state. Even the 4,000 word handover document I wrote doesn’t quite seem to encapsulated everything… but it will have to do.
Things I have been reading
Not a huge amount of time for reading, but I have been cracking on with M John Harrison’s The Centauri Device, and I can completely understand how that warped my mind when I read it at the age of 10. We were on the one Spanish holiday we did as a family. It was the only science fiction paperback in the English newsagent, and I devoured it. Related: I now remember where Iain M Banks pinched his idea for slightly odd ship names.
The three things which most caught my attention
- The Observer on Hollywood strikes and AI. I cannot agree with this more: corporations can’t be trusted with AI.
- Tim Bray’s note on why he left Twitter. The time for being on Twitter is long past, and Tim was an early(ish) proponent of leaving it.
- How Stanley Kubrick upset Arthur C Clarke. Written by Michael Moorcock, who knew Clarke well from his early SF writing career. Includes the interesting snippet that at one point Kubrick tried to dump Clarke from 2001: A Space Odyssey and get it written by either Moorcock or JG Ballard. Certainly, a Ballardian spin on HAL might have been interesting…
